Category: Technology

Summer is a quieter time for school transportation (relatively, of course), so this may be the best time of year for preparing a Request for Proposals (RFP) for those technology solutions you’re considering adding to your district operations. In order to help you craft an RFP that gets you the win as much as your … Continue reading What Happens When a Vendor Responds to an RFP?

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Warmer temperatures are underway. Baseball games and track meets dominate your athletic trip schedule. You’re planning for the hectic finals week. Somehow, it's almost the end of the school year again and, if you’re like most people who work in K-12 transportation, you cringe when someone says, “Aren't you off for the summer?” Not only … Continue reading Summer School and Routing Software

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There are as many viewpoints on technology in the K-12 industry as there are transportation professionals. You can see this easily in the vast differences between district operations. Some districts are fully equipped with the latest GPS/AVL technology, student card readers, routing and field trip software and even on-board tablets for navigation. Others use spreadsheets and … Continue reading Industry Viewpoints on Technology

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I still remember getting my first PC at work (1988), my first email (1992) and even proudly showing my dad how I could instantly alphabetize a long list of names with my spreadsheet. In the beginning, technology seemed like a special, almost magical addition to our lives. Contrast that with the influence of technology on … Continue reading Remember When We Used to Call It High Tech?

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“The server is down.” “We should be back up shortly.” Several hours later: “Sorry for the inconvenience, the server is now back online.” You might be thinking that an outage measured in hours is too long, and you would be right. But what if hours turned into days, or even weeks? Our dependency on technology … Continue reading Are You Ready for Disaster?

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I remember reading a study performed three years ago by US News and World Report where they evaluated the thirty largest industries in the US and discussed how each performed their business functions. Education, being one of these industries, was described with the byline, “Education generates more data than any other industry, and uses it … Continue reading Information-Based Decision Making: Part Two

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A lot has been said and written supporting the concept of data driven decision making. But far less has been published about how decision makers actually get from raw data to a final, real-life decision. And even less about the ways in which decision makers have to first interrogate that data. In reality, even the … Continue reading Information-Based Decision Making: Part One

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The way users interact with computers and software has changed dramatically over the years, and continues to evolve as technology advances. Some of you may remember the days of green and black text on a monitor displaying the commands that were typed on the keyboard, when only rarely did you have a reason to use … Continue reading A Brief History of the Computer User Experience

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What does mobile mean to you? The answer to that question very likely depends on how old you are. I got my first PC at work twenty five years ago and still clearly remember my first email. I’ve been using my desktop PC as my main source of computing power and connectivity ever since. While … Continue reading Going Mobile

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As a former resident of Southern California, the horrific news over the last several months of natural disasters like tornadoes and tropical storms all over the country and world has brought back memories of the times when earthquakes or large fires would bring the LA area to a standstill, as workers struggled to help people … Continue reading Is District Technology Addressed in Your Disaster Recovery Plan?